Studies of Contemporary Poets by Mary C Sturgeon

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Title: Studies of Contemporary Poets
Author: Mary C. Sturgeon
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STUDIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

STUDIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

By MARY C. STURGEON AUTHOR OF "WOMEN OF THE CLASSICS" ETC.

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY MCMXVI

PRINTED AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS LONDON, ENGLAND

TO

PROFESSOR W. H. HUDSON
IN GRATITUDE AND ESTEEM

Acknowledgment

The author begs to offer warm thanks to the following poets and their publishers, for the use of the quotations given in
these studies:
Mr Masefield and "John Presland"; Mr John Lane for the work of Mr Abercrombie and Mrs Woods; Messrs Sidgwick
and Jackson for the work of Miss Macaulay and Rupert Brooke; Mr A. C. Fifield and Mr Elkin Mathews for the work
of Mr W. H. Davies; Messrs Constable for the work of Mr de la Mare; Mr Elkin Mathews, New Numbers, and the
Samurai Press for the work of Mr W. W. Gibson; the Poetry Bookshop for the work of Mr Hodgson; Messrs Max
Goschen Ltd. for the work of Mr Ford Madox Hueffer; Messrs Maunsel and Co Ltd for the work of the members of
"An Irish Group" and of Mr Stephens; the Samurai Press and the Poetry Bookshop for the work of Mr Monro; and Mr
William Heinemann for the work of Mrs Naidu.

Contents

PAGE

LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE
11

RUPERT BROOKE
36

WILLIAM H. DAVIES
53

WALTER DE LA MARE
72

WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
87

RALPH HODGSON
108

FORD MADOX HUEFFER
122

AN IRISH GROUP
137

ROSE MACAULAY
181

JOHN MASEFIELD
197

HAROLD MONRO
217

SAROJINI NAIDU
235

"JOHN PRESLAND"
248

JAMES STEPHENS
282

MARGARET L. WOODS
301

BIBLIOGRAPHY
327

Lascelles Abercrombie

In the sweet chorus of modern poetry one may hear a strange new harmony. It is the life of our time, evoking its own
music: constraining the poetic spirit to utter its own message. The peculiar beauty of contemporary poetry, with all its
fresh and varied charm, grows from that; and in that, too, its vitality is assured. Its art has the deep sanction of loyalty:
its loyalty draws inspiration from the living source.
There is a fair company of these new singers; and it would seem that there should be large hope for a generation,
whether in its life or letters, which can find such expression. Listening carefully, however, some notes ring clearer,
stronger, or more significant than others; and of these the voice of Mr Abercrombie appears to carry the fullest
utterance. It is therefore a happy chance that the name which stands first here, under a quite arbitrary arrangement, has
also a natural right to be put at the head of such a group of moderns.
But that is not an implicit denial to those others of fidelity to their time. It is a question of degree and of range. Every
poet in this band will be found to represent some aspect of our complex life—its awakened social conscience or its

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frank joy in the world of sense: its mysticism or its repudiation of dogma, in art as in religion: its mistrust of materialism
or keen perception of reality: its worship of the future, or assimilation of the heritage of the past to its own ideals: its
lyrical delight in life or dramatic re-creation of it: its insistence upon the essential poetry of common things, or its
discovery of rare new values in experience and expression.
This poetry frequently catches one or another of those elements, and crystallizes it out of a mere welter into definite
form and recognizable beauty. But the claim for Mr Abercrombie is that he has drawn upon them more largely: that he
has made a wider synthesis: that his work has a unity more comprehensive and complete. It is in virtue of this that he
may be said to represent his age so fully; but that is neither to accuse him of shouting with the crowd, nor to lay on the
man in the street the burden of the poet's idealism. He is, indeed, in a deeper sense than politics could make him, a
democrat: perhaps that inheres in the poetic temperament. But intellectuality like his, vision so brilliant, a spirit so keen
and a sensuous equipment so delicate and bountiful are not to be leashed to the common pace. That is a truism, of
course: so often it seems to be the destiny of the poet to be at once with the people and above them. But it needs
repetition here, because it applies with unusual force. This is a poet whose instinct binds him inescapably to his kind,
while all the time his genius is soaring where the average mind may sometimes find it hard to follow.
One is right, perhaps, in believing that this particular affinity with his time is instinctive, for it reveals itself in many ways,
subtler or more obvious, through all his work. As forthright avowal it naturally occurs most in his earlier poems. There
is, for example, the humanitarianism of the fine "Indignation" ode in his first volume, called Interludes and Poems. This
is an invocation of righteous anger against the deplorable conditions of the workers' lives. A fierce impulse drives
through the ode, in music that is sometimes troubled by its own vehemence.

Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword,

Into the Spirit's hands?

.....

Against our ugly wickedness,

Against our wanton dealing of distress,
The forced defilement of humanity,

.....

And shall there be no end to life's expense
In mills and yards and factories,

With no more recompense

Than sleep in warrens and low styes,

And undelighted food?

Shall still our ravenous and unhandsome mood
Make men poor and keep them poor?—

In the same volume there is a passage which may be said to present the obverse of this idea. It occurs in an interlude
called "An Escape," and is only incidental to the main theme, which is much more abstract than that of the ode. A young
poet, Idwal, has withdrawn from the society of his friends, to meditate about life among the hills. All the winter long he
has kept in solitude, his spirit seeking for mastery over material things. As the spring dawns he is on the verge of
triumph, and the soul is about to put off for ever its veil of sense, when news reaches him from the outer world. His little
house, from which he has been absent so long, has been broken into, and robbed, by a tramp. The friend who comes to
tell about it ends his tale by a word of sympathy—"I'm sorry for you"—and Idwal replies:

It's sorry I am for that perverted tramp,
As having gone from being the earth's friend,
Whom she would have at all her private treats.
Now with the foolery called possession he
Has dirtied his own freedom, cozen'd all
His hearing with the lies of ownership.
The earth may call to him in vain henceforth,
He's got a step-dame now, his Goods....

Evidence less direct but equally strong is visible in the later work. It lies at the very root of the tragedy of Deborah, a
heroine drawn from fisher-folk, who in the extremity of fear for her lover's life cries:

O but my heart is dying in me, waiting:

.....

For us, with lives so hazardous, to love
Is like a poor girl's game of being a queen.

And it is found again, gathering materials for the play called The End of the World out of the lives of poor and simple

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people. Here the impulse is clear enough, but sometimes it takes a subtler form, and then it occasionally betrays the
poet into a solecism. For his sense of the unity of the race is so strong that natural distinctions sometimes go the way of
artificial ones. He has so completely identified himself with humanity, and for preference with the lowly in mind and
estate, that he has not seldom endowed a humble personality with his own large gifts. Thus you find Deborah using this
magnificent plea for her sweetheart's life:

... there's something sacred about lovers.

.....

For there is wondrous more than the joy of life
In lovers; there's in them God Himself
Taking great joy to love the life He made:
We are God's desires more than our own, we lovers,
You dare not injure God!

Thus, too, a working wainwright suddenly startled into consciousness of the purpose of the life-force muses:

Why was I like a man sworn to a thing
Working to have my wains in every curve,
Ay, every tenon, right and as they should be?
Not for myself, not even for those wains:
But to keep in me living at its best
The skill that must go forward and shape the world,
Helping it on to make some masterpiece.

And with the same largesse a fiddling vagabond, old and blind, thief, liar, and seducer, is made to utter a lyric ecstasy
on the words which are the poet's instrument:

Words: they are messengers from out God's heart,
Intimate with him; through his deed they go,
This passion of him called the world, approving
All of fierce gladness in it, bidding leap
To a yet higher rapture ere it sink.

... There be

Who hold words made of thought. But as stars slide
Through air, so words, bright aliens, slide through thought,
Leaving a kindled way.

Now, since Synge has shown us that the poetry in the peasant heart does utter itself spontaneously, in fitting language,
we must be careful how we deny, even to these peasants who are not Celts, a natural power of poetic expression. But
there is a difference. That spontaneous poetry of simple folk which is caught for us in The Playboy of the Western
World or The Well of the Saints, is generally a lyric utterance springing directly out of emotion. It is not, as here, the
result of a mental process, operating amongst ideas and based on knowledge which the peasant is unlikely to possess.
One may be justified, therefore, in a show of protest at the incongruity; we feel that such people do not talk like that.
The poet has transferred to them too much of his own intellectuality. Yet it will probably be a feeble protest,
proportionate to the degree that we are disturbed by it, which is practically not at all. For as these people speak, we are
convinced of their reality: they live and move before us. And when we consider their complete and robust individuality,
it would appear that the poet's method is vindicated by the dramatic force of the presentment. It needs no other
vindication, and is no doubt a reasoned process. For Mr Abercrombie makes no line of separation between thought
and emotion; and having entered by imagination into the hearts of his people, he might claim to be merely interpreting
them—making conscious and vocal that which was already in existence there, however obscurely. There is a hint of this
at a point in The End of the World where one of the men says that he had felt a certain thought go through his mind
—"though 'twas a thing of such a flight I could not read its colour." And in this way Deborah, being a human soul of full
stature, sound of mind and body and all her being flooded with emotion, would be capable of feeling the complex
thought attributed to her, even if no single strand of its texture had ever been clear in her mind. While as to the fiddling
lyrist, rogue and poet, one sees no reason why the whole argument should not be closed by a gesture in the direction of
Heine or Villon.
We turn now to the content of thought in Mr Abercrombie's poetry—an aspect of his genius to be approached with
diffidence by a writer conscious of limitations. For though we believed we saw that his affinity with the democratic spirit
of his age is instinctive, deeply rooted and persistent, his genius is by no means ruled by instinct. It is intellectual to an
extreme degree, moving easily in abstract thought and apparently trained in philosophic speculation. Indeed, his
speculative tendency had gone as far as appeared to be legitimate in poetry, when he wisely chose another medium for
it in the volume of prose Dialogues published in 1913.
It must not be gathered from this, however, that the philosophic pieces are dull or difficult reading. On the contrary, they
are frequently cast into the form of a story with a dramatic basis; and although the torrent of thought sometimes keeps

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the mind astretch to follow it, it would be hard to discover a single obscure line. An astonishing combination of qualities
has gone to produce this result: subtlety with vigour, delicacy with strength, and loftiness with simplicity. Things elusive
and immaterial are caught and fixed in vivid imagery; and often charged with poignant human interest. No other modern
poet expresses thought so abstract with such force, or describes the adventures of the voyaging soul with such clarity. It
suggests high harmony in the development of sense and spirit: it explains the apparent incompatibility between his
rapture of delight in the physical world and his spiritual exaltation: while it hints a reason for his preoccupation with the
duality in human life, and his vision of an ultimate union of the rival powers.
We may note in passing how this reacts upon the form of his work. It has created a unique vocabulary (enriched from
many sources but derived from no single one), which is nervous, flexible, vigorous, impassioned: assimilating to its grave
beauty words homely, colloquial or quaint, until the range of it seems all but infinite.
Again, rather curiously, the thought has tended toward the dramatic form. At first glance that form would seem to be
unsuitable for the expression of reflectiveness so deep as this. Yet here is a poet whose dominant theme might be
defined, tritely, as the development of the soul; and he hardly ever writes in any other way.
The fact sends us back to the contrast with the Victorians. The representative poet then, musing about life and death
and the evolution of the soul, felt himself impelled to the elegiac form, or the idyll. But the nature of the thought itself has
changed. The representative poet now does not stand and lament, however exquisitely, because reality has shattered
dogma: neither does he try to create an epic out of the incredible theme of a perfect soul. He accepts reality; and then
he perceives that the perfect soul is incredible, besides being poor material for his art. But on the other hand, while he
takes care to seize and hold fast truth: while it does not occur to him to mourn that she is implacable: he resolutely
denies to phenomena, the appearance of things, the whole of truth. That is to say, he has transcended at once the
despair of the Victorians and their materialism. He has banished their lyric grief for a dead past, along with their
scientific and religious dogmas. That was a bit of iconoclasm imperatively demanded of him by his own soul; but from
the fact that he is a poet, it is denied to him to find final satisfaction in the region of sense and consciousness.
Thus there arises a duality, and a sense of conflict, which would account for the manner of his expression, without the
need to refer it to the general tendency of modern poetry towards the dramatic form. Doubtless, however, that also has
been an influence, for the virility of his genius and the positive strain in his philosophy would lead that way.
One can hardly say that there are perceptible stages in Mr Abercrombie's thought. He is one of the few poets with no
crudities to repent, either artistic or philosophic. Yet there is a poem in his first volume, a morality called "The New
God"; and there is another piece called "The Sale of St Thomas," first published in 1911, which are relatively simple.
Here he is content to take material that is traditional, both to poetry and religion, and infuse into it so much of modern
significance as it will carry. The first re-tells the mediæval legend of a girl changed by God into his own likeness in order
to save her from violence. There is, apt to our present study, but too long to give in full, at least one passage that is
magnificent in conception and imagery alike. It is the voice of God, answering the girl's prayer that she may be saved by
the destruction of her beauty. The voice declares that the petition is sweet and shall be granted, that he will quit the
business of the universe, that he will "put off the nature of the world," and become

God, when all the multitudinous flow
Of Being sets backward to Him; God, when He
Is only glory....

The "Sale of St Thomas" also treats a legend, with originality and power. This remarkable poem is already well known:
but one may at least call attention to the fitness and dignity with which the poet has placed the modern gospel upon the
lips of the Christ. Thomas has been intercepted by his master, as he is about to run away for the second time from his
mission to India.

Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear;
Easily may a man crouch down for fear,
And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face
The hailing storm of the world with graver courage.
But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin,
And one that groweth deep into a life,
With hardening roots that clutch about the breast.
For this refuses faith in the unknown powers
Within man's nature; shrewdly bringeth all
Their inspiration of strange eagerness
To a judgment bought by safe experience;
Narrows desire into the scope of thought.
But it is written in the heart of man,
Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire.
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;

.....

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But send desire often forth to scan
The immense night which is thy greater soul;
Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul,
Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being,
And of created purpose reach the ends.

Perhaps the thought here is not so simple as the pellucid expression makes it to appear: yet the conventional material on
which the poet is working restrains it to at least relative simplicity. When, however, his inspiration is moving quite freely,
unhampered by tradition either of technique or of theme, the result is more complex and more characteristic.
The tragedy called "Blind", in his first volume, is an example. The plot of this dramatic piece is probably unique. If one
gave the bald outline of it, it might seem to be merely a story of crude revenge. It is concerned with rude and outlawed
people: it springs out of elemental passions—fierce love turned to long implacable hatred, and then reverting to
tenderness and pity and overwhelming remorse. And yet there are probably no subtler studies in poetry than the three
persons of this little drama—the woman who has reared her idiot son to be the weapon to avenge her wrongs upon the
father he has never known: the blind son himself; and his father, the same fiddling tramp whom we have already noted.
There are points in the delineation of all three which are very brilliantly imagined: the change in the woman when she
meets at last the human wreck who had once been her handsome lover: the idiot youth hungering to express the beauty
which is revealed to him, through touch, in a child's golden hair, the warmth of fire, the mysterious presence of the dark:

... like a wing's shelter bending down.
I've often thought, if I were tall enough
And reacht my hand up, I should touch the soft
Spread feathers of the resting flight of him
Who covers us with night, so near he seems
Stooping and holding shadow over us,
Roofing the air with wings. It's plain to feel
Some large thing's near, and being good to us.

But, above all, there is the character of the fiddler. At first glance, the phenomenon looks common enough and all its
meaning obvious. "A wastrel" one would say, glibly defining the phenomenon; and add "a drunken wastrel," believing
that we had explained it. But the poet sees further, apprehends more and understands better. Drunken indeed, but an
intoxication older and more divine than that of brandy began the business; and much brandy had not quenched the elder
fire. It flamed in him still, mostly a sinister glow, fed from his bad and sorrowful past, but leaping on occasion to fair
radiance, as in the talk with his unknown son, when some magnetic influence drew the two blind men together and made
them friends before they had any knowledge of relationship. Of the many finer touches in this poem, none is more
delicate and none more moving than the suggestion of unconscious affinity between these two: the idiot, with his half-
awake mind, groping amidst shadows of ideas which to the older man are quick with inspiration.

Son. What are words?

Tramp. God's love! Here's a man after my own heart;
We must be brothers, lad.

But besides his dramatic and psychological interest, the fiddler is important because he seems to represent the poet's
philosophy in its brief iconoclastic phase. For we find placed in his lips a destructive satire of the old theological doctrine
of Good and Evil. The passage is too long to quote, and it would be unfair to mutilate it. Incidentally we may note,
however, the keen salt humour of it, and how that quality establishes the breadth and sanity of the poet's outlook. The
point of peculiar interest at the moment is that this phase passes with the particular poem—an early one; and
thenceforward it is replaced by more constructive thought. We come to "The Fool's Adventure," for instance, and find
the "Seeker" travelling through all the regions of mind and spirit to find God, and the nature and cause of sin. His quest
brings him first to the Self of the World, and he believes that this is God. But the Sage corrects him:

... Poor fool,

And didst thou think this present sensible world
Was God?...

.....

It is a name, ...
The name Lord God chooses to go by, made
In languages of stars and heavens and life.

And when, finally, he has won through to a certain palace at the "verge of things," he cries his question to the unseen
king within.

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Seeker. Then thou art God?

Within. Ay, many call me so.
And yet, though words were never large enough
To take me made, I have a better name.

Seeker. Then truly, who art thou?

Within. I am Thy Self.

Another aspect of the same idea, caught in a more lyrical mood, will be found in the poem called "The Trance." The
poet is standing upon a hill-side alone at night, watching the "continual stars" and overawed by the vastness and "fixt
law" of the universe. Then, in a sudden revelation of perhaps a fraction of a minute:

I was exalted above surety
And out of time did fall.
As from a slander that did long distress,
A sudden justice vindicated me
From the customary wrong of Great and Small.
I stood outside the burning rims of place,
Outside that corner, consciousness.
Then was I not in the midst of thee
Lord God?

.....

That, however, is the triumphant ecstasy of a moment. More often he is preoccupied with the duality in human nature,
and in "An Escape" there is a fine simile of the struggle:

Desire of infinite things, desire of finite.
... 'tis the wrestle of the twain makes man.
—As two young winds, schooled 'mong the slopes and caves
Of rival hills that each to other look
Across a sunken tarn, on a still day
Run forth from their sundered nurseries, and meet
In the middle air....
And when they close, their struggle is called Man,
Distressing with his strife and flurry the bland
Pool of existence, that lay quiet before
Holding the calm watch of Eternity.

The incidence of finite and infinite is felt with equal force: sense is as powerful as spirit, and therein of course lives the
keenness of the strife. In "Soul and Body" there is a passage—only one of many, however—in which the rapture of
sensuous beauty is expressed. The spirit is imagined to be just ready to put off sense, to be for ever caught out of "that
corner, consciousness." And the body reminds it:

Thou wilt miss the wonder I have made for thee
Of this dear world with my fashioning senses,
The blue, the fragrance, the singing, and the green.

.....

Great spaces of grassy land, and all the air
One quiet, the sun taking golden ease
Upon an afternoon:
Tall hills that stand in weather-blinded trances
As if they heard, drawn upward and held there,
Some god's eternal tune;

We may take our last illustration of this subject from a passage at the end of the volume called Emblems of Love. It is
from a poem so rich in beauty and so closely wrought, that to quote from it is almost inevitably to do the author an
injustice. But the same may be said about the whole book: while single poems from it will disclose high individual value,
both as art and philosophy, their whole effect and meaning can only be completely seized by reading them as a
sequence, and in the light of the conception to which they all contribute.
The book is designed to show, in three great movements representing birth, growth, and perfection, the evolution of the
human spirit in the world. The spirit, which is here synonymous with love, is traced from the instant which is chosen to
mark its birth (the awakening sense of beauty in primitive man), through its manifold states of excess and defect, up to a

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transcendent union which draws the dual powers into a single ecstasy. The greatness of the central theme is matched by
the dignity of its presentment, while the dramatic form in which it is embodied saves it from mere abstraction. We see
the dawn of the soul in the wolf-hunter, suddenly perceiving beauty in nature and in women: the vindication of the soul
by Vashti, magnificently daring to prove that it is no mere vassal to beauty: and the perfecting of the soul in the terrible
paradox of Judith's virginity. But it is in one of the closing pieces, called fittingly "The Eternal Wedding," that the poet
attains the summit of his thought along these lines; prefiguring the ultimate union of the conflicting powers of life in one
perfect rapture.

... I have

Golden within me the whole fate of man:
That every flesh and soul belongs to one
Continual joyward ravishment ...
That life hath highest gone which hath most joy.
For like great wings forcefully smiting air
And driving it along in rushing rivers,
Desire of joy beats mightily pulsing forward
The world's one nature....

... so we are driven

Onward and upward in a wind of beauty,
Until man's race be wielded by its joy
Into some high incomparable day,
Where perfectly delight may know itself,—
No longer need a strife to know itself,
Only by its prevailing over pain.

That is the topmost peak that his philosophy has gained—for just so long as to give assurance that it exists. But no one
supposes that he will dwell there: it is altogether too high: the atmosphere is too rare. It was reached only by the
concentration of certain poetical powers, chiefly speculative imagination, which carried him safely over the chasms of a
lower altitude. But when other powers are in the ascendant, as for instance in The End of the World: when he is
recalled to actuality by that keen eye for fact which is so rare a gift to genius of this type, the terror of those lower
chasms is revealed. Here is one of the characters reflecting on the thought of the end of the world, which he believes to
be imminent from an approaching comet:

Life, the mother who lets her children play
So seriously busy, trade and craft,—
Life with her skill of a million years' perfection
To make her heart's delighted glorying
Of sunlight, and of clouds about the moon,
Spring lighting her daffodils, and corn
Ripening gold to ruddy, and giant seas,
And mountains sitting in their purple clothes—
O life I am thinking of, life the wonder,
All blotcht out by a brutal thrust of fire
Like a midge that a clumsy thumb squashes and smears.

That passage will serve to point the single comment on technique with which this study must close. It has not been
selected for the purpose, and therefore is not the finest example that could be chosen. It is, however, typical of the
blank-verse form which largely prevails in this poetry, and which, in its very texture, reveals the same extraordinary
combination of qualities which we have observed in the poet's genius.
We have already seen that spiritual vision is here united with intellectuality as lucid as it is powerful: that the mystic is
also the humanitarian: that imagination is balanced by a good grip on reality; and that the sense-impressions are fine as
well as exuberant. We have seen, too, that this diversity and apparent contrast, although resulting in an art of complex
beauty, do not tend towards confusion or obscurity. There has been a complete fusion of the elements, and the molten
stream that is poured for us is of glowing clarity.
Exactly the same feature is discernible in the style of this verse. Look at the last passage for a moment and consider its
effect. It is impossible to define in a single word, because of its complexity. The mind, lingering delightedly over the
metaphor of life the mother, is suddenly awed by the magnitude of the idea which succeeds it. The æsthetic sense is
taken by the light and colour of the middle lines, and then, as if the breath were caught on a half-sob, a wave of emotion
follows, pensive at first, but rising abruptly to a note that is as rough as a curse. There are more shades of thought,
lightly reflective or glooming with prescience; and there are more degrees of emotion, from tenderness to wrath, than we
have time to analyze. The point for the moment is the manner in which they are conveyed, and the adequacy of the
instrument to convey them.
The texture of the verse itself will provide evidence of this. Here are barely a dozen lines of our English heroic verse;
and they will be found to contain the maximum of metrical variety. Probably only two, or at most three of them (it
depends upon scansion, of course) are of the regular iambic pentameter: that is to say, built up strictly from the iamb,

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which is the unit of this form. All the others are varied by the insertion at some point in the line, and frequently at two or
three points, of a different verse-unit, dactyl, anapæst, trochee or spondee; and no two lines are varied in exactly the
same way.
But, besides the range of the instrument, there is the exquisite harmony of it with mood or idea. The strong down-beat
of the trochee summons the intellect to consider a thought: the dactyl will follow with the quick perception of a simile:
the iamb will punctuate rhythm: anacrusis will suggest the half-caught breath of rising emotion, and turbulent feeling will
pour through spondee, dactyl, and anapæst. And so with the diction. Just as we find a measure which is both vigorous
and light, precise and flexible, easily bending law to beauty; so in the language there is a corresponding union of strength
and grace, homeliness and dignity. Could a great conception be stated in a simpler phrase than that of the two first
lines?

Life, the mother who lets her children play
So seriously busy, trade and craft—

and yet this phrase, simple and lucid as it is, conveys a sense of boundless tenderness and pity, playing over the surface
of a deeper irony. Doubtless its strength and clarity come from the fact that each word is of the common coin of daily
life; but its atmosphere, an almost infinite suggestiveness of familiar things brooded over in a wistful mood, comes partly
at least through the colloquial touch.
Mr. Abercrombie has no fear to be colloquial, when that is the proper garment of his thought, the outer symbol of the
inner reality. Nor is he the least afraid of fierce and ugly words, when they are apt. The last line of our passage illustrates
this. Taken out of its setting, and considering merely the words, one would count a poet rash indeed who would venture
such a harsh collocation. But repeat the line aloud, and its metrical felicity will appear at once: put it back in its setting,
as the culmination of a wave of feeling that has been gathering strength throughout: remember the idea (of beauty
annihilated by senseless law and blind force), which has kindled that emotion; and then we shall marvel at the art which
makes the line a growl of impotent rage.
All of which is merely to say that the spirit of this poetry has evolved for itself a living body, wearing its beauty
delightedly, rejoicing in its own vitality, and unashamed either of its elemental impulse or its transcendent vision.

Rupert Brooke

Born at Rugby on August 3, 1887;
Died at Lemnos an April 23, 1915
Probably most English people who love their country and their country's greatest poet have at some time taken joy to
identify the spirit of the two. England and Shakespeare: the names have leapt together and flamed into union before the
eyes of many a youngster who was much too dazzled by the glory to see how and whence it came. But returning from a
festival performance on some soft April midnight, or leaning out of the bedroom window to share with the stars and the
wind the exaltation which the play had evoked, the revelation suddenly shone. And thenceforward April 23 was by
something more than a coincidence the day both of Shakespeare and St George.
Reason might come back with the daylight to rule over fancy; and the cool lapse of time might remove the moment far
enough to betray the humour of it. But the glow never quite faded; or if it did it only gave place to the steadier and
clearer light of conviction. One came to see how the poet, by reason of his complete humanity, stood for mankind; and
how, from certain sharp characteristics of our race, he stood pre-eminently for English folk. And coming thence to the
narrower but firmer ground of historical fact, one saw how shiningly he represented the Elizabethan Age, with its eager,
inquisitive, and adventurous spirit; its craving to fulfil to the uttermost a gift of glorious and abundant life.
Now precisely in that way, though not of course in the same superlative degree, one may see Rupert Brooke standing
for the England of his time. And when this poet died at Lemnos on April 23, 1915, those who knew and loved his work
must have felt the tragic fitness of the date with the event. If the gods of war had decreed his death, they had at least
granted that he might pass on England's day. In him indeed was manifested the poetic spirit of the race, warm with
human passion and sane with laughter: soaring on wings of fire but nesting always on the good earth. And though one
does not claim to find in him the highest point or the extremest advance to which the thought of his day had gone, he
stands pre-eminently for that day in the steel-clear light of his gallant spirit.
The title of Rupert Brooke's posthumous book—1914—signifies that moment of English history which is reflected in his
work. He is the symbol of that year in a double sense. He represents the calamitous political event of it in his voluntary
service to the State, and the manner of his death. Thus by the accident of circumstance which made him eminent and
vocal, he serves to speak for the silent millions of English men and women who splendidly sprang to duty. But in his
poetry there is a closer and deeper relation to that tragic year. Incomplete as it may be: youthful and prankish as some
of it is, the thought and manner of the time are imaged there. A certain level of humane culture had been reached, a
certain philosophy of life had been evolved, and a definite attitude to reality taken. Lightly but clearly, these things which
reflect the colour of our civilization at August 1914 are crystallized in Rupert Brooke's poetry to that date. But at that

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point the image, like the whole order of which it was the reflection, was shattered by the crash of arms; and the few
poems which he wrote subsequently are preoccupied with the spiritual crisis which the war precipitated.
Most of the admirers of this poet have seen only in his last pieces the singular identity of his spirit with the spirit of his
country. And that is so noble a concord that it cannot be missed. For when England plunged into the greatest war of
history, she flung off in the act several centuries of her age. Priceless things, slowly and patiently acquired, went
overboard as mere impedimenta; but in the relapse, the slipping backward to an earlier time and consequent recovery
of youth, with its ardour and passion, its recklessness and generosity and courage, the optimist saw a reward for all that
was lost. So with the poetry of Rupert Brooke. Those few last sonnets, as it were the soul of rejuvenated England,
seem to the same hopeful eye a complete compensation, not only for the wasted individual life, but for the beauty and
significance of the age for which he stood, now irrevocably lost.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be

Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,

Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

And we have come into our heritage.

Before that renunciation one can only stand with bowed head, realizing perhaps more clearly than the giver did, the
splendour of the gift. But he too, this representative of his age, knew the value of the life that he was casting away. It
was indeed to him a "red sweet wine," precious for the "work and joy" it promised, and the sacred seed of immortality.
It is this, above all, that his poetry signifies: a rich and exuberant life, keenly conscious of itself, and fully aware of the
realities by which it is surrounded. Its nature grows from that—sensuous and spirituelle, passionate and intellectual,
ingenuous and ironic, tragic and gay. Never before—no, not even in Donne, as some one has suggested—was such
intensity of feeling coupled with such merciless clarity of sight: mental honesty so absolute, piercing so fierce a flame of
ardour.
From the fusion of those two powers comes the distinctive character of this poetry: the peculiar beauty of its gallant
spirit. They are constant features of it from first to last, but they are not always perfectly fused nor equally present. In
the earlier poems, to find which you must go back to the volume of 1911 and begin at the end of the book, they enter
as separate and distinct components. One would expect that, of course, at this stage; and we shall not be surprised,
either, if we discover that there is here a shade of excess in both qualities: a touch of self-consciousness and relative
crudity. The point of interest is that they are so clearly the principal elements from which the subtle and complex beauty
of the later work was evolved. Thus, facing one another on pages 84 and 85, are two apt examples. In "The Call" sheer
passion is expressed. The poet's great love of life, taking shape for the moment as love of his lady, is here predominant.

Out of the nothingness of sleep,

The slow dreams of Eternity,

There was a thunder on the deep:

I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night's primeval bars,

I dared the old abysmal curse,

And flashed through ranks of frightened stars

Suddenly on the universe!

.....

I'll break and forge the stars anew,

Shatter the heavens with a song;

Immortal in my love for you,

Because I love you, very strong.

But on the opposite page, the sonnet called "Dawn" swings to the extremest point from the magniloquence of that. It is
realistic in a literal sense: a bit of wilful ugliness. Yet it springs, however distortedly, from the root of mental clarity and
courage which was to produce such gracious blossoming thereafter. It is engaged with an exasperated account of a
night journey in an Italian train: all the discomfort and weary irritation of it venting itself upon two unfortunate Teutons.

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.....

One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again.

The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain

Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere

A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air

Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before....
Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.

It is not long, however, before we find that the two elements are beginning to combine; and we soon meet,
astonishingly, with the third great quality of the poet's genius. It is strange that imagination always has this power to
surprise us. No matter if we have taught ourselves that poetry cannot begin to exist without it: no matter how watchful
and alert we think we are, it will spring upon us unaware, taking possession of the mind with amazing exhilaration. That
is especially true of the quality as it is found in Rupert Brooke's poetry. For, however you have schooled yourself, you
do not expect imaginative power of the first degree to co-exist with sensuous joy so keen, and so acute an intelligence.
Yet in a piece called "In Examination" the miracle is wrought. This, too, is an early poem, which may be the reason why
one can disengage the threads so easily; whilst a notable fact is that the delicate fabric of it is woven directly out of a
commonplace bit of human experience. The poet is engaged with a scene that is decidedly unpromising for poetical
treatment—all the stupidity of examination, with its dull, unhappy, "scribbling fools."

Lo! from quiet skies
In through the window my Lord the Sun!
And my eyes
Were dazzled and drunk with the misty gold,

.....

And a full tumultuous murmur of wings
Grew through the hall;
And I knew the white undying Fire,
And, through open portals,
Gyre on gyre,
Archangels and angels, adoring, bowing,
And a Face unshaded ...
Till the light faded;
And they were but fools again, fools unknowing,
Still scribbling, blear-eyed and stolid immortals.

There are at least two poems, "The Fish" and "Dining-Room Tea," in which imaginative power prevails over every other
element; and if imagination be the supreme poetic quality, these are Rupert Brooke's finest achievement. They are,
indeed, very remarkable and significant examples of modern poetry, both in conception and in treatment. In both pieces
the subjects are of an extremely difficult character. One, that of "The Fish," is beyond the range of human experience
altogether; and the other is only just within it, and known, one supposes, to comparatively few. The imaginative flight is
therefore bold: it is also lofty, rapid, and well sustained. In "The Fish" we see it creating a new material world, giving
substance and credibility to a strange new order of sensation:

In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.

.....

But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.

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Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run.
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.

We see, all through this poem (and the more convincingly as the whole of it is studied) the "fundamental brain-stuff": the
patient constructive force of intellect keeping pace with fancy every step of the way. So, too, with "Dining-Room Tea."
Imagination here is busy with an idea that is wild, elusive, intangible: on the bare edge, in fact, of sanity and
consciousness. It is that momentary revelation, which comes once in a lifetime perhaps, of the reality within appearance.
It comes suddenly, unheralded and unaccountable: it is gone again with the swiftness and terror of a lightning-flash. But
in the fraction of a second that it endures, æons seem to pass and things unutterable to be revealed. Only a poet of
undoubted genius could re-create such a moment, for on any lower plane either imagination would flag or intellect
would be baffled, with results merely chaotic. And only to one whose quick and warm humanity held life's common
things so dear could the vision shine out of such a homely scene. But therein Rupert Brooke shows so clearly as the
poet of his day: that through the familiar joys of comradeship and laughter: through the simple concrete things of a
material world—the "pouring tea and cup and cloth," Reality gleams eternal.

When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too,
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall

.....

Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter....

Till suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked upon your innocence.
For lifted clear and still and strange
From the dark woven flow of change
Under a vast and starless sky
I saw the immortal moment lie.
One instant I, an instant, knew
As God knows all. And it and you
I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
In witless immortality.

But the precise characteristic of this poetry is not one or other of these individual gifts. It is an intimate and subtle
blending of them all, shot through and through with a gallant spirit which resolutely and gaily faces truth. From this brave
and clear mentality comes a sense of fact which finds its artistic response in realism. Sometimes it will be found
operating externally, on technique; but more often, with truer art, it will wed truth of idea and form, in grace as well as
candour. From its detachment and quick perception of incongruity comes a rare humour which can laugh, thoughtfully
or derisively, even at itself. It will stand aside, watching its own exuberance with an ironic smile, as in "The One Before
the Last." It will turn a penetrating glance on passion till the gaudy thing wilts and dies. It will pause at the height of life's
keenest rapture to call to death an undaunted greeting:

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;

Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die

All's over that is ours; and life burns on

Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"

"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.

Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread

Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

Perception so keen and fearless, piercing readily through the half-truths of life and art, has its own temptation to mere
cleverness. Thence come the conceits of the sonnet called "He Wonders Whether to Praise or Blame Her," a bit of the
deftest juggling with ideas and words. Thence, too, the allegorical brilliance of the "Funeral of Youth"; and the merry

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mockery of the piece called "Heaven." This is an excellent example of the poet's wit, as distinct from his richer, more
pervasive, humour. It is very finely pointed and closely aimed in its satire of the Victorian religious attitude. And if we
put aside an austerity which sees a shade of ungraciousness in it, we shall find it a richly entertaining bit of philosophy:

Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto Mud!—Death eddies near—
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!

.....

And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

But, on the whole, one loves this work best when its genius is not shorn by the sterile spirit of derision. Its charm is
greatest when the creative energy of it is outpoured through what is called personality. Never was a poet more lavish in
the giving of himself, yielding up a rich and complex individuality with engaging candour. And poems will be found in
which all its qualities are blended in a soft and intricate harmony. Passion is subdued to tenderness: imagination stoops
to fantasy: thought, in so far as it is not content merely to shape the form of the work, is bent upon ideas that are wistful,
or sad or ironic. Humour, standing aloof and quietly chuckling, will play mischievous pranks with people and things. A
satirical imp will dart into a line and out again before you realize that he is there; and all the time a clear-eyed, observing
spirit will be watching and taking note with careful accuracy.
Of such is "The O...